Poetry

We’re in the middle of it, in the middleof the backyard barbecuing steakand chicken. Telling stories with our wives and girlfriends away,red and blue psychedelics, Coors Lightand breasts falling into our mouths again like basalt cliffs into the sea.Jeremy says, I did CPR on a gorilla once.A girl gorilla, a big one. I kept thinking,…

They’d traveled one by oneon their knees beneath the earthto be gathered at the station to be given robes and haloes and official papers. And a bus ticket each to the roadside motelin Ohio that heldthe reservations in their names, where those who’d been slain before them were waiting. Can these be the right martyrs?…

When I hear the young refer to someone as adouche bag, I want to say, You may havenever seen a douche bag. They were redrubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’dfill it and hang it high enoughso that gravity…I can’t go on,I see my mother’s douche bag, my poordouche-bag mom’s pathetic douche bag with itsclamps,…

And every morning the sun comes up. And the pretty coffee in a cup. And a bird meowing outside in a tree. And, on the ceiling, the water stain of England made sadder by singing in a minor key. The size of a coffin, and full of bees.Shadow on a tractor, mowing the field.The cat,…

When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting.Your mother is there, and your father is there,and my mother and father, and what they might havethought of each other. And our people—back from ourfolks, back—are there, and what theymight have had to do with each other;if one of yours and one of…

So here are the strange feelings that flickerin you or anchor like weights in your eyes.Turn back and you might undo them,the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor chords blur and…

After Pablo Neruda This piranha in your poem,this river-missile drawn to fleshI once dangled from a fishing line.I know you won’t believe me,but when I held its flapping body to my ear,it moaned.The piranha moaned,like the medicine man moansof a riverhe believes is an anaconda,a sibilant serpentswallower of men. In turbid watersthe piranha sigh,and baring…

For every forest, there is a pig screamingout like a child as the butcher’s knife popsopen its throat. For every bucket of pig’s blood,a bucket of rainwater, saved to hydratea spring garden. For every Amish-horse-and-buggysign on a country road, a teenager exhalespot smoke into a pillow in her parents’ basement.For every time I see you…

In the stories it’s different: grief,like the dark, lifts eventually—a tenderness inside which, with allthe clarity of bells when for once theyring like nothing but the ringing bellsthey are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, likea horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighterthan ash on a sudden wind, or any windat…